Adobe takes 48 hours to email Creative Cloud serial numbers

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In April of this year Adobe unveiled a new version of its subscription service called Creative Cloud to coincide with the release of Creative Suite 6. For many people Creative Cloud makes a lot of sense as it replaces the need to spend thousands of dollars for Creative Suite with the ability to pay a monthly subscription.

We’ve all become used to subscription services. You hand over your credit card or PayPal details after filling out an online form. In return, you are emailed a serial number which activates the software for use, and continues to allow access as long as you pay each month.

Typically the email containing your serial number takes a few minutes to arrive once payment is complete. In the worst cases I’ve been kept waiting an hour for that mail to arrive. But for some reason Adobe can’t even supply your Creative Cloud serial number in a day, let alone an hour.

Pat Dryburgh, a user interface designer, experienced this first hand. Sitting in an airport in San Francisco, he decided to sign up for Creative Cloud as his Photoshop 6 beta had just expired. Figuring he could get some work done during the flight he went through Adobe’s subscription process and sat there waiting for the serial number to arrive in his inbox. It didn’t. In fact, for the next 48 hours it didn’t arrive, meaning Pat got absolutely no work done for the entire weekend let alone the flight.

If this was a boxed product you could expect it to take up to two days to arrive in the post. But this is a digital product that Adobe is happy to instantly take your money for. Many other services also work this way and manage to deliver serial numbers in minutes via email, so why can’t Adobe?

Pat even went so far as to initiate an online chat with Adobe support to find out what was taking so long. He was told serial numbers take between 24-48 hours to arrive. When his request got escalated he was again told the 24-48 hour delivery window remained in place.

So, anyone considering signing up for a Creative Cloud subscription know that your purchase may remain unusable for up to two days. If Adobe is reading this, I think your system needs review and serial numbers should be delivered in under 5 minutes once a customer’s payment has been processed.